flistorians anti flistorical Societies 



AN ADDRESS 

AT THE OPENING OF THE FENWAY BUILDING OF 
THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

April 13, 1899 



BY 



CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, LL.D, 

Preshjent of the Society 



fitstorians anti Historical ^octettes 



AN ADDRESS 

AT THE OPENING OF THE FENWAY BUILDING OF 
THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



April 13, 1899 



BY 

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, LL.D. 
President of the Society 



CAMBRIDGE 
JOHN WILSON AND SON 

HniiJErsita ^xtss 
1899 






^1602 




HISTORIANS 

AND 

HISTORICAL SOCIETIES. 



In 1791, — eight years more than a century ago, — the site 
upon which this building stands was an indistinguishable por- 
tion of the " Roxbury flats," as the region hereabouts had im- 
memorially been called, — the neck-ward side of Boston's 
Back Bay. It was a remote, unfrequented locality ; while 
Court Street, as the ancient Queen Street of proyincial times 
had three years before been renamed, was still a place of resi- 
dence. On the 21st day of January, of that year, eight Boston 
gentlemen met by appointment in the house of one of their 
number, William Tudor, — the house then standing on the 
corner of Court Street and what was still known as Prison 
Lane, now Court Square, — the present familiar site of the 
northerly portion of Young's Hotel. Four of the eight were 
ministers, — divines of the provincial period : all were men 
of middle life, the oldest, James Sullivan, being in his forty- 
eighth year, while Thomas Wallcut, the youngest, was only 
thirty-three. The constitution of Massachusetts had at that 
time been adopted only ten years before. John Hancock was, 
for the eighth time, Governor of the Commonwealth ; it was 
but the second year of the first administration of Washington. 
The eight gentlemen, all born British subjects and only re- 
cently become citizens of the young republic, had met for the 
purpose of forming an historical society, — certainly the first 
organization of its kind in America, possibly the first in the 
world. They called it simply " The Historical Society," a 
name which, three years later, when a formal act of incorpo- 
ration was obtained from the Legislature, became '' The Mas- 
sachusetts Historical Society," — the name the organization 
has ever since borne, and now inscribed over the entrance to 
this, its third building and sixth abiding-place. 



As one thinks of those eight gentlemen gathered in the par- 
lor of the Court Street dwelling on that January day, 1791, 
and the purpose for which they were there met, one of the 
great rhetorical passages of English literature suggests itself, 
especially to an American, — Burke's much quoted vision of 
Lord Bathurst, — then, it may be added, not yet become a 
classic, seeing that it was uttered only fifteen years before, 
and Burke was still living, a man of sixty-two. In that mem- 
orable passage, you will recall, Burke pictures to the House of 
Commons an angel as drawing aside from before the eyes of 
him whom he describes as " the auspicious youth," the curtain 
which veils futurity, and revealing the wonders he was des- 
tined to see. Had the Genius of History, invoked that day in 
the comfortable, four-square Boston dwelling by those eight 
gentlemen, — four of them divines of the earlier Massachu- 
setts stock, — raised for them in like manner that curtain 
veiling futurity, it is curious to reflect on the range of feelings 
he would have excited, — astonishment, wonder, admiration, 
disgust, apprehension, fear. Their future is our past; what 
they would have apprehended darkly we have seen face to 
face. Let us look at it for a moment, if we can, through their 
eyes, and in Edmund Burke's mirror. 

The angel of Lord Bathurst, you remember, enhanced the 
rising glories and commercial grandeur of England, by first 
unfolding bright and happy scenes of household prosperity and 
domestic honor ; then, presently, pointing out in the larger 
and grander panorama which gradually opened, a little speck, 
scarce visible in the mass of national interest, a small seminal 
principle rather than a formed body, he went on : " Young 
man, there is America, — which at this day [1704] serves for 
little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and 
uncouth manners, yet shall, before you taste of death, show 
itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts 
the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing 
to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by 
varieties of people, by succession of civilized conquests and 
civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, 
you shall see as much added to her by America in a single 
life ! " 

Burke, I am well enough aware, is a dangerous spirit to in- 
voke. His imagination and his rhetoric suggest a standard 



with which no one cares to challenge comparison ; nor is it 
altogether easy to drop at once from his lofty sustained ex- 
pression to our simpler modes of speech. I will try to do so. 
When the founders met, the town of Boston numbered, it 
is supposed, some 20,000 inhabitants ; and its original topog- 
raphy, as well as its forms of political life, were almost 
unimpaired, — the town-meeting and its board of selectmen 
still ruling the little peninsula, which a single bridge only 
connected with the mainland. Physically it was thus in all 
essential respects the Tri-mount on which one hundred and 
sixty years before Winthrop found Blackstone dwelling, — a 
hermit in a wilderness. Intellectually, and politically even, 
it did not greatly differ from the Boston of Cotton Mather, 
Zabdiel Boylston and Samuel Sewall, — the Boston in which 
Franklin was born and Samuel Adams agitated, — the same 
Boston whose affairs Thomas Hutchinson administered so well. 
But one physical aspect of the Boston and its immediate vicin- 
ity of 1791 has peculiar interest for us here now and on this 
occasion. The Common, an unenclosed pasture stretching 
down to the easterly beach of the Back Bay, was on the out- 
skirts of the town ; and beyond it lay a broad tidal estuary, 
fringed by reaches of salt marsh through which creeks and 
channels wound a sinuous way, along whose edges, the haunt 
and the home of curlew and wild fowl, the eel and the 
bivalve, tall sedge grass waved. The single traditional road, 
with rude structures here and there along its sides, still led 
from near the foot of the Common, across the Neck, to the 
neighboring town of Roxbury ; and this building stands on an 
extension of what was then known as Frog Lane, within the 
limits of Roxbury, and in the midst of what would have seemed 
to those eight gentlemen in Court Street a dreamy exhalation 
from the familiar '' Flats." 

Such was the situation in the fast-aging eighteenth century. 
The nineteenth has now already drawn yet nearer to its close. 
Now imagine the Genius of History raising, that January day, 
the curtain which covered futurity from before the eyes of our 
founders, as Burke's angel raised it before those of Bathurst. 
The thought, even at this time, suggests a shiver. What, it 
might almost be asked, did not that century, then about to 
begin, now closing, have in store, — what ingredient for sur- 
prise, whether that of admiration or of horror ? Pursuing the 



6 

course suggested by Burke, the eyes of the founders would 
first have rested on scenes of domestic honor and prosperity 
not less alluring than those which would have made glad the 
heart of young Bathurst. True, in the Boston of to-day the 
founders would have sought in vain to recognize some familiar 
feature of their home. Its very profile is changed ; for two of 
Trimount's three hills are gone. If they looked long enough, 
and with a scrutiny sufficiently close, they might, among the 
towering monuments of modern trade, detect a few familiar 
buildings, — King's Chapel, their State House, the '• Old 
South," Faneuil Hall ; but Boston, reaching out over its busy 
thoroughfares to one half the points of the compass, — Boston, 
absorbing adjacent territory, creating new territory, would 
have ceased to be a peninsula, while in what they knew as 
the Back Bay marshes, — now dotted with trees and shrubbery, 
and become a region of watercourses, driveways and parks, — 
in this by them least-suspected quarter would be pointed out 
the home of the Society they had that day met to create. 

It was at this stage in the vision that the angel called 
Bathurst's attention to America, — the scarcely visible speck — 
the "seminal principle rather than a formed body." History, 
not territory, was the domain our founders were gathered 
there to enter upon. And it would seem as if it could not 
have been without a gleam of Satanic mischief in his face 
that the genius of the occasion now unrolled the record of 
those then living or but lately dead, who, tested by the com- 
ing century's judgment, had by their writings most con- 
tributed to historic thought and historic methods ; for it is 
not easy, though it assuredly verges on the ludicrous, to 
imagine the dismay with which those four divines at least 
would have read, blazoned on the roll in letters of a resplen- 
dency which obscured and even obliterated the rest, the 
names of Gibbon and Voltaire. Voltaire, the scofiing French 
infidel, — at once the loathing and the terror of the orthodox; 
— Gibbon, the free-thinker, whose history its president was 
that very year about publicly to announce, was not tolerated 
as part of the curriculum of the neighboring university. Mil- 
lot's '^ Elements," whatever that may be, was, as a text-book, 
preferred, while " Gibbon's history was never thought of.'* 

And from this point forward it is greatly to be feared the 
heretofore beneficent Genius would have assumed an ever- 



increasing Mephistophelian aspect in the eyes of those newly 
emancipated colonists, — the eight historical Fausts of Boston, 
— while the vision would have become altogether painful in 
its interest and its surprises. Again it changed. And now 
the very foundations, the accepted primal facts, the basic 
syenite, as it were, not only of human history but of religious 
belief, one by one crumbled away, and Adam, even, had not 
waked and walked in Eden. No longer descended from 
angels, man had been evolved from an ape. And worse yet was 
to come ; a world in which the principles of historical criti- 
cism, applied to the books of Herodotus, were also applied to 
those of Moses ; and, in no irreverent spirit be it said, the 
Saviour even was discussed and weighed as a young Jewish 
philosopher, — the son of a Nazarene carpenter. They little 
dreamed it, those eight gentlemen, — for at best they were 
not of the imaginative kind ; though, for that matter, had 
they been of imagination all compact, they would hardly 
have dreamed it the more, — they little dreamed that the 
world, their world, even then stood on the very brink of 
the French revolution, — that chasm yawning between the 
centuries. 

But it is time to have done with Burke and with visions, 
and come to the matter in hand. Hard upon sixty years have 
now elapsed since Thomas Wallcut, the last survivor of that 
little party of 1791, was borne to his grave. The life of the 
Society they organized includes within a mere span the entire 
development of modern historical processes and philosophy ; 
and it is at worst not more than a pardonable exaggeration to 
say that our organization goes back to the movement which, 
as respects historical method, thought and expression, was the 
equivalent of that other movement of two centuries before in 
art and letters, which we call the Renaissance. Of the later 
movement our Society has been a part. It has in a greater or 
less degree sympathized in its spirit ; sooner or later, it has 
accepted its results. That spirit and those results are the 
theme for to-day ; and, in measuring what has been already 
accomplished, I shall endeavor in some degree to forecast what 
remains immediately to be done : for in the great process of 
evolution the last step ever leads to the next. There is no 
finality in results. 

The lines along which the process of thought and study 



directed to history were in future to be pursued bad already, 
ill 1791, assumed definite sbape. Coming at once to tbe con- 
crete, our fatbers — and by tbe pbrase " our fatbers " in tbis 
connection I refer to tbe generation wbicb intervened between 
us and tbe founders — looked upon Hume, Robertson and 
Gibbon as tbe tbree great modern historians, — tbat incom- 
parable English triumvirate through whose example and pre- 
cepts tbe classic traditions had been revived. No better 
method of reaching a correct understanding of tbe progress 
up to this time made in what we would fain believe to be the 
science of history can, therefore, be devised, than by taking 
these tbree writers as a landmark, — a starting-point, as it 
were, — to estimate their work from tbe standpoint we occupy. 
It is only necessary further to premise that they all antedate 
our Society ; for, though Robertson and Gibbon did not die 
until 1793 and 1794, their work had in 1791 been done. The 
publication of Hume's history, begun in 1754, was completed 
in 1761 ; Robertson's Charles V., on which his reputation 
to-day mainly rests, appeared in 1769 ; while the first volume 
of " Tbe Decline and Fall," which included the famous 
fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, came out in 1776, and tbe 
last volume in 1788. Between the publication of the earliest 
English historical work of the modern school and the organi- 
zation of this Society, thirty-six years had, therefore, elapsed. 

Looking back through the perspective of an additional cen- 
tury, there can be no manner of question that those histories 
marked, for tbe years between 1750 and 1790, a distinct step 
in advance. Through them historical work was at last differ- 
entiated from other literary pursuits, and the day was forever 
gone when polite and elegant writers of the Goldsmith and 
Smollett type could make a living from booksellers by alter- 
nating a history of Greece with one of Animated Nature, a 
history of Rome with a comedy or a novel, and a history of 
England with a poem, a volume of essays, or a book of travels. 
From that time forth historians were to constitute a class by 
themselves. Accordingly, all other historical writers in the 
English tongue before 1791 may, in comparison with these 
three, — Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, — be dismissed from 
consideration. These three were workers, though not the first 
workers, in a new field ; for Bossuet, Condorcet, Montesquieu 
and Voltaire bad, though in another tongue, already preceded 



them. The difficulty with their method, briefly stated, was 
that in it history was divorced from philosophy. They had 
not, so to speak, picked up the true scent, and they coursed 
wildly. But nowhere have I found this subject treated with 
such learning and subtle insight as in Leslie Stephen's " His- 
tory of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century " ; and, as 
what I have to say of these writers is, to use an architectural 
expression, the motive of my discourse, I propose to use Mr. 
Stephen's work freely, adopting his conclusions and, at times, 
even his language as my own. Speaking then of the his- 
tories of the triumvirate, he says they " have a common weak- 
ness, though Gibbon's profound knowledge has enabled his 
great work to survive the more flimsy productions of his col- 
leagues. The fault, briefly stated, seems to be an incapacity 
to recognize the great forces by which history is moulded, and 
the continuity which gives to it a real unity. We have but 
a superficial view, — a superficiality, in the cases of Hume and 
Robertson, implying inadequate research ; and both in their 
place and Gibbon's implying a complete acquiescence in the 
external aspects of events, and the accidental links of connec- 
tion, without any attempt to penetrate to the underlying and 
ultimately determining conditions." This defect was, how- 
ever, the inevitable result and concomitant of the stage to 
which human knowledge had then advanced ; and it mattered 
little if at all whether any particular historical problem was 
approached from the rationalistic or the theological point of 
view, infidel or catholic, by Bossuet or Voltaire, by Warbur- 
ton or Hume, the result was the same ; and, in the absence of 
a more correct philosophy of the universe, the globe and man- 
kind, it had of necessity to be the same. If Bossuet or War- 
burton took up the theme, a Divine Agency, working through 
Special Providences and in ways unknown and unknowable 
to man, set sequence at defiance ; if Hume or Voltaire tried 
their hands at the problem, their formula was that, in the 
range of possibilities, " anj^thing may be the cause of anything 
else," and combinations, in reality, as we have since come to 
see, quite superficial and of only passing influence, — mere 
disturbing factors, like comets among heavenly bodies, — 
might produce results entirely incommensurate with their ap- 
parent importance ; — what in the one case was the volition of 
an irresponsible deity became in the other a contingency of 



10 

chance. Thus the slightest accidents might change, not only 
a dynasty or a form of government, but the whole social con- 
stitution or the beliefs of the human race. In other words, 
from Bossuet to Voltaire and from Warburton to Gibbon 
these attempts at history, however learned or pious, witty or 
astute, were but the first crude interrogations of human ex- 
perience, and in this field, as in geology, chemistry and biol- 
ogy, revealed only varieties of external conformation, without 
exhibiting the governing forces which mould the internal 
constitution. So completel}', indeed, did those writers fail to 
appreciate the unseen and the deep-seated, whether influences 
or tendencies, and, consequently, what we regard as the phi- 
losophy of human development, — that, as the result of their 
historical studies, Hume, on the verge of the French revolu- 
tion, set down representative government as a mere passing 
stage of disturbance, and pictured the despotism of the Bour- 
bons as the Euthanasia of the British constitution ; while 
Gibbon fixed upon the incipient decadence of the age of the 
Antonines as that period of the world's history in which an 
intelligent man, endowed with the power of choice, would 
most have wished his lot to have been cast. 

But a simile may here be of use. So far as true historical 
methods are concerned, the situation during the second half 
of the last century is suggestive of the meet and the hunting 
field ; — the pack was there, — the dogs, good, bad and in- 
different, were sniffing and yelping, crossing and recrossing 
each other's tracks, now and again starting off in some wrong 
direction and on a false cry, but ever circling to better pur- 
pose, and hot on the chase ; then, suddenly, a deep-voiced call 
is heard, some animal more sagacious or more experienced or 
with keener senses than the rest has struck the true scent, and 
raised the cry, — the game 's afoot, and at once serious work 
begins, the whole hunt swinging into line behind the baying 
hounds. When, however, it comes to extorting its great secrets 
from reluctant nature, the true scent is not easily or quickly 
found ; it is no morning fox-hunt or day's rapid run : but 
the process is tentative and slow, and, even when at last the 
problem is solved, its solution is apt to come indirectly and in 
some unanticipated way. It was so in the case of history. 

During the last half of the eighteenth century and the first 
half of the nineteenth, it was with thought and the historical 



11 

methods as with maritime discovery three centuries before ; 
the world was fast ripening for the great discoverer and liis 
great discovery. The human mind was steadily and persistently 
groping its way. The " Esprit des Lois " was published in 
1750, and Montesquieu has been pronounced by authority than 
which I know none higher the founder of the modern his- 
torical method. The same year also Turgot read to the Sor- 
bonne his discourse on the " Successive Advances of the 
Human Mind " ; and, only six years later, in 1756, Voltaire's 
" Essai sur les Moeurs " appeared, the first disclosing, by a 
flash of thought almost prophetic, the future philosophy of 
history, while the last applied to historical evidence the true 
critical spirit. At almost the same time in England great in- 
vestigators, — men far greater than Robertson, greater than 
Hume in other respects, if not greater in his special line of 
inquiry, — men as great even as Gibbon, were patiently feeling 
after the true historical method, and results of the first im- 
portance were obtained in one direction by Adam Smith, and 
in another by Burke. 

This Society was, however, destined to have passed by 
several years its first semi-centennial, and two whole genera- 
tions of mankind had, since 1791, been gathered to their 
fathers, before the riddle was rightly read, and the true scent 
struck. Even then the riddle was read on another page of the 
book, and the scent struck in a field close to that of histor3^ 
but not history itself. On the 1st day of October, 1859, a few 
months only less than forty years ago, a book, essentially scien- 
tific and yet not beyond easy popular comprehension, was 
quietly published, entitled "The Origin of Species"; and from 
that first day of October, 1859, a new epoch in the study of his- 
tory dates.^ The true scent was struck, — the long-threatened, 

1 While these pages were passing through the press I chanced upon a more 
scientific statement of the influence exercised by Darwin on historical thought 
and methods. It is in J. M. Robertson's " Buckle and liis Critics " (1895, pp. 14, 
15) : " [Buckle] wrote, it must always be remembered, before Darwin published 
the ' Origin of Species.' Now, in logical course, a complete grasp of law in 
social life can only be conceived as following on a grasp of law in animal life. 
During three hundred years, step after step has been taken by educated Europe 
towards a completely scientific view of the cosmos ; and each step in turn has 
been vehemently resisted by religious feeling, which specially embodies the 
principle of fixation in ideas. The Copernican astronomy and the Newtonian 
pliysics were in their day of propaganda utterly repugnant to prevailing opinion. 
When, after generations of confused progress, they had been assimilated by 



12 

the fiercely assailed Mosaic cosmogony, including its origin of 
man, with all that it implied of celestial or providential inter- 
ference in his process of development, was displaced, and 
relegated, though with no unreverential touch, to its final 
resting-place. It now stands there side by side with the 
Ptolemaic astronomy, among those great discarded theories, 
the stepping-stones on which man has slowly risen through 
error to truth, — out of darkness into light. 

Since then what had before seemed chaos has become order 
and law. No longer descended from angels, — a son fallen 
from grace, — the race of man upon earth has become, like 
other kindred developments, matter for classification and sys- 
tematic study. Before, he was the plaything of fate, when 
he was not either favored or frowned upon through those 
supernatural interferences the last faint suggestions of which 
as agencies in the outcome of human affairs have not yet 
ceased to be heard ; for within half a century a grave his- 
torian of our own land has not been ashamed to refer to a fog, 
which opportunely covered from sight certain military opera- 
tions, as " providential," just as the artists of two centuries 
earlier portrayed in their frescos the forces of Heaven con- 
tending on the side of the Cross. It is safe, however, now to 
say that before many more years have elapsed unmeaning 
language of this sort will be as much out of date, and sound 
as curiously, as the old folk-lore talk, once taken seriously 
enough, of gnomes, genii and fairies. Already men and 
human events are studied as the logical outcome of a long and 
complicated natural process in which the two leading factors 
are environment and continuity, and the result, evolution. 
Under this new impetus the historical conception and histori- 
cal methods have undergone rapid and noticeable changes. 
Human history has become part of a comprehensible cos- 
mogony, and its area vastly extended. No longer a mere 

orthodoxy, there was little resistance — save that of professional routine — to a 
scientific treatment of chemistry, since that dealt with a set of ideas altogether 
outside ordinary religious thinking ; but the scientific method in geology was 
angrily resented, because that plainly clashed with the theological habit of 
thought and speech, as well as with the sacred books. And scarcely had the 
educated world adjusted itself to geology as unquestionable science, when Buckle 
came forward with his challenge on the field of social history ; while just on his 
heels came Darwin, with the biology that horrified a sanhedrim which liad sup- 
posed itself settled for life in an incomplete geology." 



13 

succession of traditions and annals, it is closely allied to 
astronomy, geology, biology ; and the rise and fall of dynasties 
are merely episodes and phases of a continuous whole, — that 
whole being the slow development of man and his institutions 
from the family to the clan, and from the clan to the nation, — 
from the kraal to the cathedral-town. From this lias followed 
another corollary of deepest significance ; both history and 
biography, for " great men are the guide-posts and land- 
marks in the State," and so biography is but another form 
of history, ceased to be mere narratives of more or less dra- 
matic possibilities, episodes which lent themselves to the 
purpose of the word-painter, the literary artist, of hardly 
more significance than a novel, and meant only to amuse, or, 
at most, to instruct, — losing this characteristic, they assumed 
a deeper significance. They acquired a scientific value. 
Each life, each episode, each epoch fell into its place as part 
of a consecutive whole, and became of import only as it was 
shown to bear on, and in some way contribute to, that whole, 
— the development of man from what he once was to what he 
now is. Take for an instance our own particular field, the 
vineyard peculiar to us. 

Ours is the Massachusetts Historical Society. In a sense, 
all history is our province, as all knowledge was Bacon's, for 
the history of Massachusetts is of value not merely as a story 
of adventure and settlement, slow growth and dramatic action, 
something in itself curious, individual and interesting, if only 
well and skilfully told, matter for a romance, an oration, or a 
poem ; in this aspect it has, indeed, its use for the literary 
artist, as Hawthorne long since showed, but for the scientific 
modern historical investigator all that is mere surplusage, — a 
tale of little meaning ; the true significance of the history of 
Massachusetts, like that of every other community, whether 
Holland or Caffreland, lies in its place in the whole, — in its 
contribution to the sum of human possessions, its part in the 
slow process of human evolution. Is mankind richer or better, 
nearer the ultimate goal, — whatever or wherever that may 
be, — because of it ; and, if so, why or how ? If such is the 
case, and in just so far as it is the case, the record of Massa- 
chusetts, as of any other community, is worthy of, and will 
repay, careful study and scientific analysis ; beyond that, it is 
of no historic value. 



14 

The answer to this question is obviously to us matter of 
moment, — for it involves nothing less than a justification, or 
otherwise, of our being. After all, have we a right to be here ? 
And that for us important preliminary question, also, I pro- 
pose now to discuss for a moment. A mere incident, the dis- 
cussion may furnish an illustration of my general proposition 
relative to the history of our day as contrasted with history 
as it was understood in the day of our founders. On this 
point I am already on record.^ I have long held that the 
history of Massachusetts is the history of the gradual and 
practical development of certain social and political truths of 
the first and most far-reaching importance ; that the passage 
of the Red Sea was, from this point of view, not a more 
momentous event than the voyage of the Mayflower, and that 
the founding of Boston w^as fraught with consequences hardly 
less important than those which resulted from the founding of 
Rome. But I am a prejudiced witness; and such utterances 
coming from the President of this Society on this occasion 
might be set down as an exaggeration, — under the circum- 
stances pardonable perhaps, but not the less to be taken with 
more than the customary grain of allowance. I propose, there- 
fore, to cite corroborative testimony, — testimony also which 
no one will be disposed lightly to set aside as lacking weight in 
the scientific scale. I have already referred to one of Mr. 
Darwin's works as marking in its publication a dividing line 
in tlie methods of historical research ; and I now quote these 
words from another work of Mr. Darwin's published twelve 
years after the " Origin of Species." He there wrote : '' Look- 
ing to the distant future, I do not think that the Rev. Mr. 
Zincke takes an exaggerated view when he says : ' All 
other series of events — as that which resulted in the culture 
of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of 
Rome — only appear to have purpose and value when viewed 
in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to . . . the great 
stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the West.' " ^ The 
reference here is not, you wdll observe, to the discovery 
of Columbus or to the settlement of America, but " to the 
great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration," — in other words, 
the voyage of the "Mayflower" and the foundation of Boston. 

1 Massachusetts, its Historians and its History, pp. 9, 10. 

2 Descent of Man, vol. i. pp. 218,219. 



15 

Further corroborative evidence of my original proposition 
would be superfluous. 

What, then, are the contributions of Massachusetts towards 
the evolution of man ? I hold them to be, not certain settle- 
ments in the wilderness, and a greater or less number, of life 
and death struggles with savage aborigines, — not conflicts on 
land and sea, — not even the spirit of adventure and gain 
which Burke has immortalized in that well-known passage 
which in literary splendor equals his vision of Bathurst ; — I 
pass over, too, the memorable agitation which culminated in 
that most dramatic episode, the Confederate Rebellion, our 
Great Civil War ; — all these are mere episodes, the material 
out of which history is made tempting to the so-called general 
reader. The contributions of Massachusetts towards the evolu- 
tion of mankind are, as I see it, of quite another character and 
three in number ; or, perhaps, I might better say, one only great 
contribution, with two corollaries therefrom. The one great 
contribution is the establishment of the principle of the equality 
of man before the law ; and the institutions corollary thereto, 
and essential to it as practical working machinery, are the 
town-meeting and the common school, -^— the Citizens' Parlia- 
ment and the Peoples' University. Herein, as I take it, is the 
distilled and concentrated essence of the history of Massa- 
chusetts, — here the justification of our existence as a Society. 

But I cannot linger to discuss this thesis further here, and 
defend my claim on behalf of our Commonwealth and our 
Society from possible assault. The significance of the contri- 
bution may not be understood ; or it may well be the validity 
.of our Massachusetts letters patent of discovery in all and 
each of these fields will be denied ; or our agency in human 
development minimized in favor of others. I must pass on to 
the wider field. History then, I will briefly say, is a many- 
sided subject, and during long periods, stretching sometimes 
to the millennial, one result, or phase rather, of development, 
essential to the process of unending evolution, will, so to 
speak, hold the stage. It is the scene in that act of the 
drama, — the matter then to be passed upon and settled. It 
is a great mistake also to assume that progress is the law ; 
that the world is always and everywhere growing gradually 
better, as it grows older. Optimistic and pleasant, this theory 
may also be Christian to a degree ; but, unfortunately, it is 



16 

not true. On the contrary, progress is the rare exception : 
races may remain in the lowest barbarism, or their develop- 
ment be arrested at some more advanced stage during periods 
far surpassing that of recorded history ; actual decay may 
alternate with progress, and even true progress implies some 
admixture of decay. Great forces work slowly ; and it is 
only after many disturbances and long-continued oscillations 
that the world is moved from one position to another. Man- 
kind, in the higher as in the lower stages of development, 
though more in the lower than in the higher, resents nothing 
so much as the intrusion upon them of a new and disturbing 
truth. The huge dead-weight of stupidity and indolence is 
always ready to smother audacious inquiries. Thus looking 
back over forty centuries, we find that, though countless na- 
tions have been in existence in every possible phase of develop- 
ment, struggling in advance or retrogression, all contributing 
something, could we only find it out, of value or significance 
in the grand result, — whether hint of encouragement, or 
warning of danger, — yet, during all that long period, — prac- 
ticall}^ the whole of recorded history, — the upward destiny 
of mankind has rested in the hands of some half-dozen races 
or nations ; — so few indeed are they, that they can be num- 
bered on the fingers, those people incarnate with an idea. 
Let us enumerate them ; so doing will not take long : the 
Assyrians, with astronomy, the dawn of science, and the 
written symbol, the origin of letters ; the Egyptian, with 
mechanics and internal improvements ; the Israelite, with 
poetry, history and the one God ; the Greek, with art, 
letters and philosophy ; the Roman, with organization anc^ 
empire ; the Papacy, with spiritual dominion ; the English- 
man, with colonization and representative government ; the 
American, with equality before the law and democracy; — 
eight nationalities in all, from the dawn of history to the pres- 
ent day, and each one of the eight carrying that species of 
development for which the race somehow possessed a special, 
so to speak an inborn, aptitude to heights of perfection never 
attained before ; and, in so far, extending the permanent 
dominion of mankind. Not for an instant be it suggested that 
other races or nations had not achieved results in the same 
lines, at the same or even at earlier times ; merely these were 
in their particular fields supreme. They had the scientific 



17 

equivalent, whatever that may be, of the old theological 
" mission." 

Furthermore, under the influence of some law of evolution 
the nature and operation of which is not yet fully understood, 
each period of development seems to present some particular 
phase, the essential battle-ground as it were of progress at the 
stage it has then reached. It assumes different issues in differ- 
ent countries, and the conflict is sometimes secular in dura- 
tion ; but the central thought is always there, and, soon or late, 
directly or indirectly, the progress of events works back to it. 
This particular phase, this central force or thought, this all- 
subordinating issue has, I submit, for the last four centuries 
been religious and political liberty. This, so far as mankind 
is concerned, is the last stage reached in that slow process 
which began when man first became an articulating and tool- 
using animal, and the end and result of which is the great 
enigma ; — 

" For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by the veil." 

But it is with the period antecedent to the now that history 
has to deal, and the value of any scrap or bit, be it more or 
less, comes from its proper placing in the entire scheme, and 
its accurate adaptation to the whole design as, so far, worked 
out. Thus it has been said of the poet Browning that he 
wrought " with the searching and unerring power of mind to 
which the one thing of importance is, ' What is the value of 
this character or incident in the history of human progress or 
reaction ? '" i 

Why is not this a concise, fair statement, from an unex- 
pected quarter, of the crucial question every modern historian 
or biographer must put to himself, and answer, if he proposes 
to do really valuable and philosophical work: Where and 
how does his particular subject — be it a nation, be it a period, 
be it an incident, or be it a man — fit into the general scheme 
of human evolution, and contribute to the grand result ? In 
so far as it does this it is of philosophic historical value, — like 
a geological study, or observations in botany or biology ; in 
so far as it fails to do this, it may be a charming literary pro- 
duction, an absorbing narrative, a vivid picture of life, man- 
ners or adventure, or it may be a mere book of annals as 

1 Robert Browning, " Essays and Thoughts," by J. T. Nettleship, p. 284. 

3 



18 

faithful as it is tiresome ; but history, in the modern sense, it 
is not. 

For instance, taking the field of biography in which to seek 
for illustrations, the two most interesting men of the last hun- 
dred years as I see them, — the two whose work was most 
far-reaching in its connection with what went before and is to 
come after, were Charles Darwin and Napoleon Bonaparte, — 
men so different and so wholly dissimilar that the mere men- 
tion of their names in the same connection cannot but cause 
surprise, and, perhaps, a sense even of amusement ; — the one 
a quiet, unassuming English naturalist and observer ; the 
other a noisy, self-assertive Corsican military adventurer. 
Their work and the results they brought about may be con- 
sidered in either of two ways, — as that of individuals, or in 
connection with their environment and the great sequence of 
human evolution. Regarded from the first point*of view, no 
comparison can be made between them ; the life of Darwin was 
devoid of incident, that of Napoleon full of dramatic action. 
Viewed, however, in connection with man's development, 
Darwin's place is the more interesting of the two, for it takes 
us straight back to the Pharaohs. Napoleon, after all, was 
but a blind iconoclast, — a tremendous instrument of far- 
reaching change under the conditions of his being. To under- 
stand him and to appreciate the work wrought through him, 
it is necessary to understand the history of Europe and eastern 
civilization during the four centuries which preceded. They 
made him possible, and gave him his significance. He is a 
bit, and a central bit, in the mosaic. Darwin also was a bit, 
but the historical mosaic of which he is a part covers thirty 
centuries ; for the figure next opposed to him, and to be stud- 
ied in connection with him, was an Israelite poet, soldier, law- 
giver and philosopher, — the one man who had dared to say 
he saw God, To understand Darwin and the conditions which 
made Darwin possible, — which prevented his being burnt or 
crucified, or, what is more probable, which caused his teachings 
not to pass by as mere idle words, — it is necessary to assign 
him his exact place in the scheme of development, and to view 
him in his connection with that scheme. It is impossible to 
understand Darwin, and Darwin's English world, without con- 
tinually bearing in mind Moses and that Hebrew philosophy, 
hoary with its three thousand years of antiquity, with which 



19 

the English naturalist came in such impressive contact. Dar- 
win confronted Moses. Whatever comes between is one great 
sequence, one immense continuity ; so the sequence is of yester- 
day and the continuity small in the case of Napoleon compared 
with what they were in the case of that other. 

One more example ; and this time brought not from biog- 
raphy, but from history. I have referred to the place Massa- 
chusetts holds in the general scheme. Were I asked what 
I considered the most interesting and dramatic episode in 
modern development, I should reply at once the great six- 
teenth-century grapple between Spain and Holland, when, as 
middle-age feudalism went down and modern nationalism arose, 
Philip the Second and William of Orange stood forth typify- 
ing in thought and method and action the two opposing forces, 
— the reactionary and the progressive. You cannot study or 
write the history of Massachusetts intelligently without bear- 
ing that struggle continually in mind. It is the key to all 
which makes the long subsequent experience here valuable, 
and gives it its correct place and signiiBcance in the grand 
result, — the States of Holland, the Commonwealth of Eng- 
land, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ; William of Orange, 
Oliver Cromwell, John Winthrop. The idea of the rights of 
man- — civil liberty, religious liberty — for which William of 
Orange fought single-handed, and against which Philip the 
Second struggled, with all the might of Rome and all the 
gold of America to aid him, was merely the earlier phase 
of that doctrine of the equality of man before the law 
which was its logical sequence under the conditions of our 
Massachusetts environment. Thus, whichever way you turn, 
the garment hangs together ; and, as the law of continuity 
asserts itself, one phase of evolution cannot be properly under- 
stood if the others are disregarded. But it is with history as 
it is with geology, — the science is still too young. Both are 
products of the century now closing. 

This new and enlarged conception, once it forced its way 
into acceptance, could not but greatly modify the methods- of 
historical treatment. It has already done so to a very consider- 
able extent, and it is safe to predict it will do so still more as 
the generations of investigators succeed each other upon the 
stage and in this, the laboratory. Even now it is not risking 
much to assert that the day of the general historian of the old 



20 

school is over. Experience has demonstrated the utter 
impossibility of accomplishing satisfactory results in that 
way ; the task set exceeds human individual capacity. 
Take, for instance, two familiar examples which at once suggest 
themselves, — Macaulay and Bancroft. Macaulay, in fact, 
though it is questionable whether he ever realized it, or, 
indeed, thought of it in that way, set for himself the task of 
dealing with one of the interesting, though minor, episodes or 
phases in the more recent stage of human evolution, — that is, 
the final organization of parliamentary, or representative, gov- 
ernment as the outcome of the struggle which, at the date 
when his narrative opened, had been going on for two centuries. 
His plan was to trace the process of this phase of development 
until it assumed its catastrophic shape in the assembly of the 
States General of France in 1789. Whether designed or 
not, this was the scope and purpose of his task if properly 
subordinated to any general scheme in the philosophy of his- 
tory. His first chapter begins with this well-remembered 
sentence — ''I purpose to write the history of England from 
the accession of King James the Second down to a time which 
is within the memory of men still living " ; in other words, he 
purposed to tell England's story during a little more than a 
century, or from 1685 to 1789, for he could hardly have 
written the words I have quoted later than 1845. This 
period could be considered and treated either as a monograph 
contribution to a general scheme, or as a complete history in 
itself. Following the classic precedents, as well as the ex- 
ample of the great English historical triumvirate, Macaulay 
proceeded to treat it as a complete history in itself ; and from 
the very necessities of the case, it resulted in neither a gen- 
eral history complete in itself nor in a monograph, but in a 
fragment, a superb historical torso. It was the same with 
Bancroft. He set out to write a history of the United States. 
The first volume he published in 1832 ; the last in 1882. 
Thus he devoted more than fifty years to his theme, — Gibbon 
devoted but twenty, — and when, because of increasing years, 
Bancroft's pen fell from his hand, he had not yet got to the 
inauguration of Washington, nor had the United States come 
into its organized form. In other words, he failed to subor- 
dinate his work to any general scheme, or, consequently, to 
reduce it within reasonable proportions. 



21 

What, then, from the modern point of view is the object or 
value of histories of this sort, combining wide original research 
with a method of treatment at once general and detailed ? 
What useful purpose do they serve? Are they meant to 
afford instruction and entertainment to what is known as 
the reading public ? If so, they are much too long and 
ponderous. It was Macaulay's boast that he would make his- 
tory so interesting that his volumes should displace the last 
novel from the young lady's work-table. And he did it ; for 
Macaulay, whatever else he may or may not have been, was 
unquestionably the greatest and most fascinating of historical 
raconteui*s. Let us regard his history, then, as a literary monu- 
ment, a work designed for the reading public. As such, it 
was a great historical novel, and — in how many volumes ? 
His fragment begins with 1665, and does not bring the year 
1701 to an end. Under his method of treatment he allows on 
an average two hundred pages to a year : and he worked at a 
rate which produced about one volume in two yeai-s. Had he 
lived, therefore, to complete it, this literary monument — this 
unapproached, and we might add, this unapproachable histori- 
cal fragment covering five years over a single century — would 
have filled a few more than thirty volumes, and, requiring 
sixty years for completion, would have furnished light and 
instructive reading for a lifetime. Many will recall Macau- 
lay's own criticism under similar circumstances on the unfor- 
tunate Dr. Xares, and his "Life and Times of Burleigh." 
The bitter chalice is now returned to the reviewer's own lips. 
After numbering, measuring and weighing Dr. Xares's 
volumes, Macaulay concluded in these words : •' Such a 
book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light 
reading by Hilpa and Shalum. But, unhappily, the life of 
man is now threescore years and ten ; and we cannot but 
think it somewhat unfair in [a single author] to demand from 
us so large a portion of so short an existence." 

It is the same with Bancroft, — he, too, lacks design, 
proportion and adaptation. His work is fragmentary ; fits into 
no general scheme. It is neither literature nor history ; for, 
as a literary narrative, the twelve volumes are too long ; 
while, as history, containing as they do the stories of thirteen 
several colonies, every student and investigator knows that, 
if he wishes to be informed as to any particular person or 



22 

event, he seeks his information, not in the volumes of Bancioft, 
but in some monograph or history specially devoted to the 
place, the individual, or the subject in question. Each of 
these monumental works therefore necessarily lacks what 
can only be secured through a better considered process of 
differentiation. In them the attempt is made to combine at 
once, on a large scale, literary narrative with historical philos- 
ophy and indiscriminate detail. Accordingly, they are too long 
for a narrative, defective in philosophy, and incomplete, as 
well as probabl}' inaccurate, in detail. 

The same criticism may be passed on all the historians of the 
old school who were contemporaries with or followed the two 
I have named. Their methods were not adapted to the ends 
they had in view. Art is long, and life is fleeting ; and the 
taste of the reading world changes. The modern man does 
not seem to have the patience, he certainly has not the leisure, of 
the former generations. It would be very interesting to 
know how many young persons now read Gibbon through as he 
was read by our fathers, or even by ourselves who grew up in 
" the fifties." Accurate information on such a point is not 
attainable ; but in the case of one public library in a 
considerable Massachusetts city I have been led to conclude 
as the result of examination and somewhat careful inquiry, 
that the cop}^ of the " Decline and Fall " on its shelves has, 
in over thirty years, not once been consecutively read through 
by a single individual. That it is bought as one of those 
"books no gentleman's library should be without," I know, 
not only from personal acquaintance with many such, but 
because new editions from time to time appear, and the book- 
sellers always have it '' in stock" ; that it is dipped into here 
and there, and more or less, I do not doubt; but that it is now 
largely or systematically read by young people of the coming 
generation, I greatly question. 

In history, as in every other branch of study, specialization 
is the rule of the day. It may have been conceivable for 
Lord Bacon to take all knowledge to be his province at a time 
when the whole legal lore of England could, it is asserted, 
have been loaded into one wheelbarrow ; but were a modern 
Lord Bacon to proclaim such a purpose, the announcement 
would excite ridicule, and very justly be accepted as con- 
clusive evidence of that inordinate conceit which is the 



23 

not unusual concomitant of a defective intellectual make-up. 
But leaving Bacon's " all knowledge " out of the question, 
and confining ourselves to some one small province in the vast 
domain of history, a change simply amazing has taken place in 
the requirements of an historian since that memorable even- 
ing in October, 1764, when, as Gibbon sat musing amidst the 
ruins of Rome's capital, while the barefooted friars were 
singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing 
the decline and fall of the city first started in his mind. Here 
again, however, I shall have recourse to our foreign associate 
already referred to ; for this matter also he has treated, and 
treated it, I need scarcely add, with that combination of serious 
thought and quiet humor peculiarly his own, and which causes, 
in those doomed as I now am to follow him, a sense of pleased 
despair. In his last publication Mr. Stephen says : — 

" A century or two ago we were content with histories after the 
fashion of Hume. In a couple of years he was apparently not only 
to write, but to accumulate the necessary knowledge for writing, a 
history stretching from the time of Julius Cassar to the time of Henry 
VII. A historian who now does his work conscientiously has to take 
about the same time to narrate events as the events themselves occu- 
pied in happening. Innumerable sources of knowledge have been 
opened, and he will be regarded as superficial if he does not more 
or less avail himself of every conceivable means of information. He 
cannot be content simply with the old chroniclers or with the later 
writers who summarized them. Ancient charters, official records of 
legal proceedings, manor rolls, and the archives of towns have thrown 
light upon the underlying conditions of history. Local historians have 
unearthed curious facts, whose significance is only beginning to be 
perceived. Calendars of State papers enable us to trace the opinions 
of the great men who were most intimately concerned in the making 
of history. The despatches of ambassadors occupied in keenly watch- 
ing contemporary events have been partly printed, and still lie in vast 
masses at Simancas and Venice and the Vatican. The Historical 
Manuscripts Commission has made known to us something of the vast 
stores of old letters and papers which had been accumulating dust in 
the libraries of old country mansions. When we go to the library of 
the British Museum, and look at the gigantic catalogue of printed 
books, and remember the huge mass of materials which can be inspected 
in the manuscript department, we — I can speak for myself at least — 
have a kind of nightmare sensation. A merciful veil of oblivion has 
no doubt covered a great deal It may be doubted whether this huge 



24 

accumulation of materials has been an unmixed benefit to history. 
Undoubtedly we know many things much more thoroughly than our 
ancestors. Still, in reading, for example, the later volumes of Macau- 
lay or Froude, we feel sometimes that it is possible to have too much 
State-paper. The main outlines, which used to be the whole of history, 
are still the most important, and instead of being filled up and ren- 
dered more precise and vivid, they sometimes seem to disappear behind 
an elaborate account of what statesmen and diplomatists happened to 
think about them at the time — and, sometimes, what such persons 
thought implied a complete misconception of the real issues.'^ ^ 

Yet, looked at from another point of view, it is scarcely an 
exaggeration to say that there are not many considerable 
branches of human knowledge concerning which the his- 
torian of the future must not in softie degree inform himself. 
Somewhere and somehow his researches will touch upon them, 
remotely perhaps, but still as factors in his problem. Cicero, 
I believe, observes something of the same sort in regard to 
the great lawyer; but the modern philosophical historian, 
who undertakes to follow out through original research every 
line of investigation which enters into his theme, must go 
beyond this, — he too must take all knowledge to be his 
province. In the olden time history was supposed to re- 
late merely to the superficial course of events ; but now 
the historian finds himself forced to deal with underlying 
causes at once subtile, intricate and remote. What we have 
come to designate as sociology is a leading factor in the 
problem, and implies a whole network of externally con- 
verging conditions, each of which involves the study of a 
literature as well as, where it is possible, a close personal 
observation of facts and phenomena. Formerly all necessary 
information it was supposed could be acquired from books, — 
manuscripts were better yet, for those were, without any ques- 
tion, what are termed " original sources." Yet the advantage 
ill dealing with Roman military operations which Gibbon de- 
clared he had derived from a short militia experience, is one 
of the commonplaces of history : as he phrased it, " the cap- 
tain of the Hampshire Grenadiers has not been useless to the 
historian of the Roman Empire." Mr. Carl Schurz has spoken 
of the infinite aid it was to him in writing the Life of Henry 
Clay that he had himself served a term in the United States 

^ Studies of a Biographer, vol. i. pp. 8-10. 



25 

Senate. But, for the old-fashioned historian, all this was, and 
still is, beside the case. Rarely, if ever, hesitating, he flies 
boldly at every kind of game, — all are fish that come to his 
net. For instance, history is largely made up of accounts of 
operations and battles on land and on sea. Weary of thread- 
ing his way through a long period of most unpicturesque 
peace, trying to make that interesting which was at best 
commonplace, the historian draws a breath of relief when at 
length he comes to a tumult of war ; — here are pride, pomp 
and circumstance, — a chance for descriptive power. I once, 
in a very subordinate capacity, though for a considerable 
period of time, was brought into close contact with warfare, 
and saw much of military operations from within, or, as 1 may 
say, on the seamy side. Since then I have read in books of 
history, and other works more avowedly of fiction, many ac- 
counts of campaigns and battles ; and, in so doing, I have 
been most deeply impressed with the audacity, not of soldiers, 
but of authors. Usually bookish men who had passed their 
lives in libraries, often clergymen, — knowing absolutely 
nothing of the principles of strategy or of the details of camp 
life and military organization, never having seen a column on 
the march, or a regiment in line, or heard a hostile shot, — 
not taking the trouble even to visit the scene of operations or 
to study its topography, wholly unacquainted with the national 
characteristics of the combatants, — these " bookish theoricks " 
substitute their imaginations for realities, and in the result 
display much the same real acquaintance with the subject 
which would be expected from a physician or an artist who 
undertook to treat of difficult problems in astronomy or 
mechanics. They are strongly suggestive of the good Dr. 
Goldsmith and his " Animated Nature." Once or twice I 
have had occasion to follow these authorities, — authors of 
standard historical works, — and in so doing have familiarized 
myself with the topography of the scenes of action they de- 
scribed, and worked down as best I could into the characters 
of those in command, and what are known as the " original 
sources " of information as to their plans and the course of 
operations. The result has uniformly been a distinct acces- 
sion of historical scepticism. 

That among men of the closet and .the historical laboratory 
are to be found military students of profound, detailed knowl- 

4 



26 

edge and great critical acumen, no one would dispute ; 
least of all we, with at least one brilliant and recognized 
exemplar in our own ranks, — a man who never saw an army 
in movement or a stricken field, and yet whom I once heard 
referred to, by one who had borne a part in fifty fights, the 
general then commanding our army, as the first among living 
military critics. I do not refer to the rare investigators of this 
character, when I say that I know of but one writer who has 
described military operations and battles, — those intricate 
movements of human pawns on a chess-board of much topo- 
graphical uncertainty, and those scientific melees in which 
skill, luck, preparation, superiority of weapons, human endur- 
ance and racial characteristics decide the question of mastery 
as between two marshalled mobs, — I know, I was saying, of 
but one writer who has described battles and military opera- 
tions in that realistic way which impresses me with a sense of 
both personal experience and literary skill. That one is 
Tolstoi, the Russian philosopher and novelist; his Austerlitz 
and Russian campaigns of Napoleon, and his Sebastopol, are 
masterpieces. A man of imagination and consummate liter- 
ary capacity, he had himself served ; and, curiously enough, 
in the same way, his compatriot, Verestchagin, has put upon 
canvas the sickening realism of war with a degree of force 
which could come only from familiarity with the cumbered 
field, and could by no possibility be worked up in the studio 
through the study of photographs, no matter how numerous, 
or the perusal of the accounts " from our special correspond- 
ents," no matter how graphic and detailed. 

But let me here illustrate from my own experience ; and, 
to occasions such as this, nothing lends immediate interest, 
possibly value even, so much as a bit of personal reminis- 
cence, — a paragraph, as it were, from an autobiography. 
As I have already mentioned, it was my fortune at one period 
to participate in a considerable number of battles, — among 
them none more famous, nor more fiercely contested, than 
Antietam and Gettysburg. The mere utterance of those 
names stirs the imagination, — visions arise at once of attack, 
repulse, hairbreadth escape, carnage and breathless suspense. 
There was, indeed, on those occasions enough and to spare 
of all these ; but not, as it chanced, in my particular case. 
Some here will doubtless remember that English fox-hunting 



27 

squire, who has gained for himself a sort of immortality by 
following his hounds over Naseby's field, I think it was, 
while the epoch-marking battle was going on. More yet 
will recall that ploughman, twice referred to so dramati- 
cally by Zola, intent upon his uninterrupted day's work near 
Sedan, when a dynasty was reeling to its fall. So my 
abiding recollection, as a participant in both Antietam and 
Gettysburg, is, not of the fierce agony of battle at its height, 
but the enjoyment of two exceedingly refreshing naps. As 
a statement, this, I am aware, is calculated to startle rather 
than to excite admiration ; but, to the historian, truth is 
sacred: and the truth is — as I have said. Neither does the 
statement imply any exceptional nerve or indifference to 
danger on my part : I make no claim to anything of the sort. 
It happened in this wise. In the campaigns of both Antietam 
and Gettysburg I was an officer in a regiment of cavalry ; a 
mere subordinate, responsible only for obedience to orders. 
At Antietam, in the height of the engagement, the division to 
which my regiment belonged was hurried across the narrow 
stone bridge at the point where the little river intersects the 
Sharpsburg road, and deployed on its further side. We were 
then directly in front of Fitz-John Porter's corps, and between 
it and the Confederate line, covering Sharpsburg. A furious 
artillery duel was going on, to and fro, above our heads, be- 
tween the batteries of Porter's command and those of the 
enemy, we being down in the valley of the river, they on the 
higher ground. The Confederate batteries we could not 
see ; nor could they see us. When we first deployed on the 
further side of Antietam creek, it seemed as if we were 
doomed, — so deafening was the discharge of artillery on 
either side, and so incessant the hurtling of projectiles as they 
passed both ways over us. Every instant, too, we expected to 
be ordered to advance on the Confederate batteries. The situa- 
tion was unmistakably trying. But no orders came ; and no 
one was hurt. By degrees it grew monotonous. Presently, 
to relieve our tired horses, we wei'e ordered to dismount, and, 
without breaking the ranks, we officers sat down on the slop- 
ing hill-side. No one was being struck; I was very tired; 
the noise was deadening ; gradually it had on me a lulling 
effect ; and so I dropped quietly asleep, — asleep in the 
height of the battle and between the contending armies ! 



28 

They woke me up presently to look after my horse, who was 
grazing somewhat wide; and, after a time, we were with- 
drawn, and sent elsewhere. I believe that day our regiment 
did not lose a man, scarcely a horse. Such is my recollection 
of that veritable charnel-house, Antietam ; — and I was a 
participant, — indeed in the fore-front of the battle. 

Gettysburg was different ; and yet, as respects somnolence, 
in my case much the same. During the days preceding 
that momentous struggle, my command' had been frequently 
engaged, and suffered heavy loss. We who remained were 
but a remnant. On the 3d of July the division to which 
we belonged occupied the high, partially wooded ground 
on the right of the line, covering the army's flank and rear. 
It was a bright July day ; hot, and with white clouds slowly 
rolling across the sky, premonitory of a thunder-storm during 
the later afternoon. From our position the eye ranged over 
a wide expanse of uneven country, fields broken by woods, 
showing nowhere any signs of an army movement, much 
less of conflict. A quiet, midsummer, champaign country. 
Neither our lines nor those of the enemy were visible to us ; 
and the sounds of battle were hushed. Waiting for orders 
and for action, we dismounted, out of regard for our horses 
as well as ourselves, and sat or lay upon the turf. Inured 
to danger by contact long and close, and thoroughly tired in 
body as overwrought in mind, we listened for the battle to 
begin ; and, shortly after noon, the artillery opened. We 
did not know it, we could see nothing in that direction, 
but it covered the famous advance of Pickett's Virginia 
division upon Meade's centre, — that wonderful, that unsur- 
passed feat of arms ; and, just then, lulled by the incessant 
roar of the cannon, while the fate of the army and the nation 
trembled in the balance, at the very crisis of the great conflict, 
I dropped quietly asleep. It was not heroic ; but it was, 
I hold, essentially war, though by no means war as imagined 
in the work-room of the theoretic historian. Yet, as an 
individual experience, to him it had its value. 

But this is digression. Returning to our theme, the 
increased and ever still increasing requirements of the mod- 
ern historian, recent experience has supplied a striking 
illustration of the vital importance of that special training and 
professional experience of which Gibbon got a glimpse as 



29 

" captain of the Hampshire grenadiers." Every recent writer 
of history has, perforce, in some way had to take into con- 
sideration the bearing and influence of naval operations and 
supremacy on dominion. In doing so they have achieved 
failures, more or less considerable. At last a specialist came 
along, — a man trained to see things from the Ocean point 
of view, — one who knew a ship, and had sailed the deep. 
" The Influence of the Sea Power upon the French Rev- 
olution and Empire " then appeared, not in ten volumes, but 
in two ; the word was spoken, and at once that all-important 
phase of the problem assumed, for the first time, its proper 
place in subordination to the whole. Captain Mahan's re- 
markable work affords also other examples, both striking and 
suggestive, of the need of this special training in those who 
undertake to deal with recondite historical problems. In one 
case he illustrates by example what he terms " the carelessness 
with which naval affairs are too often described by general 
historians," by '' carelessness " meaning a combination of 
ignorance and audacity ; and he then over and over calls 
attention to the fact that Napoleon, with his intuitive military 
instinct, " to the end of his career, was never able to appreciate 
the conditions of naval warfare." ^ Thus Napoleon himself 
had not, nor could he acquire, what one of his acute French 
critics terms that " sentiment exact des difficultes de la 
marine^^^ the possession of which in his own case the average 
historical writer assumes as a matter of course. And again, 
the immensely interesting and curiously recondite period dis- 
cussed by Mahan in his second work, the period of the Berlin 
and Milan decrees and of the British Order in Council, has 
likewise recently been treated by another American historian, 
to whom Mahan takes occasion once for all to acknowledge 
his " great indebtedness in threading the diplomatic intrica- 
cies" of the narrative.^ Mr. Henry Adams wrote his account 
from the diplomatic point of view ; as Captain Mahan has 
written his from the naval point of view. Both views are 
essential to a correct understanding of what then occurred ; 
and yet, I submit, separately nor together, do they give a full 
insight into the situation. Neither Mr. Adams nor Captain 
Mahan had a commercial experience, or could look at the 

1 Influence of Sea Power upon the French Eevolution and Empire, vol. i. 
p. 160 ; ibid. p. 325 ; ii. p. 27. 

2 Ibid. p. 292. 



30 

problem with the trained eye of a merchant or economist. 
In this respect .the works of both are distinctl}- defective ; 
for, in those j^ears, the whole struggle was over trade and trade 
channels ; and, as a merchant or banker knows little of naval 
operations or diplomacy, how can a sailor or a diplomat know 
much of finance or of commerce ? Yet the average historian, 
going back always to what he is pleased, in professional par- 
lance, to term the original sources of history, knows it all. 

But the fields are many, and heretofore the worker has 
been one ; and, if he follows the old formulas, the general 
historian of the future must arrogate to himself downright 
omniscience. Not merely a student in his own tongue, he 
must be a linguist and a cosmopolitan, — a soldier, a sailor, 
and, like Voltaire, a Bohemian philosopher. He must, of 
course, be a statesman, a diplomatist, a parliamentarian, 
a lawyer, a physician, a theologist, an educator and a mech- 
anician, besides being a scientist and a great traveller, with 
a quick insight into human nature ; for there is not one of 
these vocations with the results of which he is not soon or 
late called upon to deal and to deal intelligently. Freeman 
goes beyond this even, and in the first of his Oxford lectures, 
while discussing the incidental helps to history, he concludes 
that, though an historical student who is also a chemist will 
clearly have an advantage over one who is not, yet this kind of 
help is so purely incidental that he could hardly counsel the 
ordinary historian " to make himself an accomplished chemist on 
the chance of the occasion." But it is otherwise with geology, 
and the group of sciences which have a close connection with 
geology. " The physical construction of any country is no 
small part of its history ; it is the key to not a little in the 
political destiny of the land and its folk." ^ And yet, I 
remember to have had some years ago a conversation with 
an historian who ranked, and still ranks, high, and deservedly 
so, as an authority on topics connected with New England and 
Massachusetts, in the course of which he suddenly, and as a 
matter of course, made the admission that he had never been 
present at a town-meeting. It must have been from pure 
indolence ; and I should not have been more surprised had a 
writer on surgery calmly let me understand that he had never 
been inside of an operating-room. 

1 Methods of Historical Study (ed. 1886), pp. 44, 45. 



31 

And this brings ns to a new phase of the subject : — What 
will be the history of the future ? Will it be the co-operative 
history ? — The history prepared by many writers, each sup- 
posed to be a master of the subject of which he treats, and 
all those subjects welded together and fused into a narrative 
by a common and competent head? I fancy not. There 
have, as we all know, been almost numberless attempts made 
in this direction, and two notable among them with which 
this Society was indirectly associated. But neither here nor 
elsewhere does the outcome of the combination of literary talent 
and special knowledge — the fusion of investigator and story- 
teller — seem to me to have been satisfactory, or to encourage 
repetition. The idea certainly is not new; for, since childhood, 
I remember looking with wonder on a certain " Universal 
History" which filled whole shelves in the library of my 
grandfather, and the early pages of which inform me now that, 
printed in London between the years 1763 and 1766, and dedi- 
cated to " his Grace the Duke of Marlborough," '' Grandson to 
the greatest Hero of our Age," it is compiled from " Original 
Authors," and tells the story of man from the " Earliest Account 
of Time to the Present." It is in sixty-four volumes, octavo, 
and seems to have occupied at least five years in its prepara- 
tion : and now, I presume, it is worth just about as much 
as an equal bulk of cord-wood. 

The difficulty with works of this sort from the beginning 
has been, now is, and ever will be, their uniformly uneven 
character, and the obvious fact that they are neither literary 
narratives nor philosophical disquisitions, nor yet the materials 
of history. Too long and cumbersome, and lacking in indi- 
viduality for the general reader, the specialist looks on them 
with contempt ; while the student of philosophy skims through 
them to see if perchance anything is there. Treated in this 
way, Mr. Traill has recently given us "Social England " in six 
volumes, as Mr. Hubert H. Bancroft is giving us a history of the 
States bordering on the Pacific, which, though still incom- 
plete, had at last accounts reached its thirty-fourth volume, in 
bulk dwarfing the " Decline and Fall " to a pigmy. But the 
one valuable lesson to be derived from all these combined and 
co-operative efforts would seem to be that no original his- 
torical work, no matter what the circumstances of its prepara- 
tion, can be of lasting value unless it is the product of a single 



32 

mind. Anything else is at best a succession of monographs 
relating to the same general subject, of unequal value and 
authority ; and, as such, would be almost as accessible, and 
probably far more thorough and valuable, in separate form. 

It now seems more probable that the differentiated treat- 
ment of history will, in the not remote future, take quite 
another direction, — if, indeed, considerable progress in that 
other direction has not even now been made. In any event, 
the tendency is apparent. The distinction will be between the 
philosophical and literary narrative on the one side, and the 
episode and monograph on the other, — all the work of mas- 
ters, and all proportioned and directed to particular ends, 
— literary, philosophical, or scientific. The monograph will 
be the basis ; in fact, I cannot but consider the monograph 
as the foundation and corner-stone of the historical edifice of 
the future. I have already alluded to the bewildering multi- 
plicity of topics and phases with which the modern historian 
must deal, and deal as a master. He must be a specialist in 
everything ; and to no man is it given to combine even a dozen 
specialties, and be a great generalizer besides. The work 
calls indeed for mental aptitudes rarely if ever found in a 
highly developed form in one and the same organization. He 
who aspires to be a general historian, or to write history on a 
large plan, can by no possibility cover all the minutiae and 
infinite details of his theme. If he would avoid error, he must 
accept the work of others, often differently organized from 
himself, almost always distinctively trained. On this point, I 
fancy, appeal might with confidence be made to any historical 
investigator who has ever written a monograph in which he 
attempted an exhaustive study of an historical incident, it 
matters not what. I have myself made several such, some of 
which are incorporated in the Proceedings of this Society. 
The result has been uniformly the same. No matter who the 
author was, or how great or how well deserved his reputa- 
tion for thoroughness and care, — George Bancroft or James 
Savage or John Gorham Palfrey, — when it came to apply- 
ing the microscope to his narrative it seemed replete with 
errors, — errors of statement, errors of judgment, errors of the 
press. It is true that in any well-considered narrative these 
errors, when of detail, correct each other, and affect but in 
slight degree, if at all, the general conclusions or the grand 



33 

result ; but, on the other hand, there are not many either 
general conclusions or grand results in history which stand 
unchallenged. The world has not yet definitely made up its 
mind as to the Gracchi, or Richard III., or Mary of Scotland. 
The topics calling for investigation, too, tend ever to increase ; 
while the material for history is already overwhelming. The 
monograph seems to be the one possible solution of the 
problem. 

But, just as there are histories and histories, so there are 
monographs and monographs; a biography is, in one sense, 
always a monograph, and a monograph often assumes the 
dimensions of a history. Investigators of to-day are apt, for 
one reason or another, to select periods or phases of develop- 
ment, and devote the study of years if not of their lives to 
them. In this way, indeed, some of the best historical work 
is now done. Naming only recent English examples, take 
Freeman's Norman Conquest, Froude's Reigns of the Tudors, 
Gardiner's War of the Rebellion, May's Constitutional His- 
tory, and Mahan's Sea Power, to mention no others, these 
works all relate to episodes, or comparatively brief phases of 
historical development. They, too, are in a way monographs. 
On the other hand, the general historian is bringing the scope 
and execution of his work within the limits of human life 
and patience. Mommsen deals with the Roman Republic, 
Green treats of the English people, each in four volumes of 
not immoderate size ; while Goldwin Smith has endeavored to 
condense all that needs to be said about the United States in 
three hundred octavo pages. This tendency it now seems prob- 
able will continue and develop. The historian of the future 
will thus profit by the example of Macaulay in more ways 
than one ; and, while pursuing his methods, will avoid the 
fatal errors into which the great raconteur fell. In other 
words, bearing in mind the unity of history as a whole, and 
the consequent subordination of its parts, he will produce his 
results through a combination of the broad and general treat- 
ment with the monographic and special treatment, — he will 
not write history on a large scale as if it were a monogram, 
nor will he, on the other hand, develop the monogram by de- 
grees into the resemblance of a history. For instance, recur- 
ring again to the example of Macaulay, — at once a model 
and a beacon of danger, — much of his best, most popular and 



34 

most enduring work was done in the form of special studies, — 
if not exactly monographs, yet in the nature of monographs. It 
is through him that the average English reader of to-day knows 
almost all he does know of Clive and of Hastings, and much 
of what little he knows of Bacon, Dryden, Addison, Johnson, 
Chatham, Pitt and Frederick the Great. Barere would be 
forgotten but for him. These were all, so far as Macaulay 
himself was concerned, preliminary studies for his more com- 
prehensive work ; but, when he came to the comprehensive 
work, he attempted it with the detail of a monograph. His 
method was thus good ; unfortunately he had not thought the 
problem out, and politics and India interfered with his execu- 
tion. So the night came for him with a task, impossible to 
finish, scarcely begun. The historian of the future seems now 
likely to pursue a different method. Recognizing the fact that 
he probably is not at once a litterateur, a soldier, a statesman, 
a lawyer, a theologian, a physician and a biologist, that he 
certainly will not live forever, that he has not the cosmogony 
at his fingers' ends, and that to ransack every repository of 
information on all possible subjects transcends the powers of 
even the most industrious, — recognizing in this degree the 
limits of possibility, he will be content to avail himself of the 
labors of others, better advised on many subjects than himself, 
and, becoming the student of monographs, derive the great 
body of his information, not, as the expression now goes, from 
" original sources," or even from personal observation, but, as 
we all in the end must, at second hand. His insight will be 
largely into the knowledge and judgment of others, and the de- 
gree of reliance to be placed in them. He will then approach 
his task piecemeal and from different points of view ; not 
fling himself on it altogether and at once. ' He will himself 
become the writer of monographs, — put forth elaborate, pre- 
liminary, tentative studies. He will thus for a long time soak 
and tan, as it were, in the learning and literature of his sub- 
ject, — approaching it now from this direction and now from 
that, studying it in its parts and in its connection with the 
whole, seeing it through many eyes and under the swa}^ of 
differing judgments, patiently endeavoring to extract from it 
its most hidden secrets and to get at the true inwardness of 
its soul of souls ; then, at last, throwing all his finished 
monographs, his preliminary studies, and his matured judg- 



35 

ments into the crucible, he will analyze, refine and condense, 
in the end pouring out the concentrated result, not in thirty 
volumes, but in two. So far as that writer and that subject 
are concerned, we will then have the doubly distilled philoso- 
phy of history, and a veritable contribution to the general 
scheme. He will have squeezed into his solution not only the 
essence of his own knowledge and thought, but the essence of 
all the thought and all the knowledge that others also have 
given to it. He will then have done what Thucydides and 
Tacitus and Gibbon — still, when all is said and done, the 
smaller Pleiad of the historical firmament — did in part be- 
fore, and yet alone have done. Combining the historical 
instinct with a highly developed literary faculty, he will seek 
to produce in the blaze of modern scientific light and follow- 
ing modern methods, not a brilliant fragment, or a bloated 
monograph, nor yet an unimaginative book of dr}^ annals, nor, 
again, a library in itself, but a masterpiece, compact, self- 
centred and philosophical, — like Shakespeare's man "look- 
ing before and after." 

If, then, I have rightly divined those historical methods 
which will be in vogue in the twentieth century, — methods 
in history based, as in science they are already based, on spe- 
cialism and division of labor, — methods, like an edifice, having 
the monograph for a base, the episode for walls, and the phi- 
losophy of history for a dome, — it remains to consider what 
part in the economy of such methods belongs to a society 
such as ours. Has it a distinct function? — And, if it has, is 
that function of importance ? I have often — more frequently 
too of late than formerly — heard it intimated that the day of 
usefulness of historical societies, even of this Society in par- 
ticular, was over ; that it had done its work and was now 
effete, — little more, indeed, than one of the world's cast-off 
garments, rich in material and strong in texture, it is true, 
but quaint, old-fashioned and outgrown ; meet onl}^ for that 
wallet time bears upon its back 

" Wherein he puts alms for obliviou. 
... To haye done is to hang 
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail 
In monumental mockery." 

And is this to be our destiny here ? Are we an organiza- 
tion the function of which has been fulfilled ? Must this So- 



36 

ciety hang here, on Boston's outward wall, " like a rusty mail 
in monumental mockery " ? Distinctly, I do not think so ; 
and that I do not think so is shown by the fact that I am 
here to-day. That the Massachusetts Historical Society has 
served, and well served, the somewhat narrow, if extremely 
useful, purposes for which the founders designed it, I both 
claim and admit. In this respect my only regret is that it 
was not organized a whole century earlier, — in 1691, instead of 
in 1791. It was at first designed to be a repository, a species of 
general receptacle of original material for history, — material 
very liable without some such receptacle, as experience had 
shown, to be scattered and lost. The Mather, the Prince, and 
the Hutchinson collections, and their fate, were fresh in the 
memories of Jeremy Belknap and his seven associates. In 1691 
Increase Mather was fifty-two years old, and his son, the more 
famous Cotton, although but twenty-eight, had already been 
seven years an ordained minister. Samuel Sewall was nearly 
forty. Joseph Dudley was forty-four. Behind them stood 
Thomas Prince, a child of only four, but preparing to assume 
the work when the others should lay it down. It is sad to 
think what we of the sixth subsequent generation have lost, 
because it did not occur to Increase Mather in 1691 to do that 
which Jeremy Belknap did a century later. Involving as it 
did the Mather, the Prince, and the Hutchinson collections, 
that loss is valde deflendum. 

Nevertheless, though much was taken, much is left ; and 
during fifty years this Society performed a most useful func- 
tion which, but for it, would have remained unperformed, and 
the world now been perceptibly poorer thereby. That work, 
however, is done, — unquestionably done ; and so far as it, 
or work of similar character, is concerned, ample provision for 
the future has elsewhere been made. There is, accordingly, 
no question this Society might to-morrow be swept out of ex- 
istence and, provided its accumulations did not go with it, no 
scholar or investigator would be appreciably the worse. The 
past is secure. But, on the other hand, the world is not yet 
finished, nor indeed, so far as is yet apparent, does it even ap- 
proximate the finished condition ; and there are many func- 
tions of usefulness to fill, in connection with history and 
historical methods, as in connection with most other things, 
the essential point being always to bear freshly in mind the 



37 

adage to " keep your light so shining a little in front of the 
next." We must adapt ourselves and our methods to the new 
conditions and the new methods. How is this to be done? 
Through what reorganization ? Through what infusion of 
new life ? 

If I am correct in my theory, — my diagnosis of the situa- 
tion, — if now in history, as already in other branches of 
scientific investigation, specialism, differentiation and com- 
bination are to be the distinguishing features of successful 
working, — if the monograph is to play a part of ever-increas- 
ing importance, then the future field of work and of use- 
fulness of this Society becomes at once clear, and is to be 
measured only by its means ; there is for it a field of devel- 
opment unlimited. An historical society such as ours acts, it 
is to be remembered, in two ways, performs two functions, — 
it is a recognized receptacle, a repository, and also an agency 
of publication. As a repository it, too, must specialize, differ- 
entiate. The accumulation of historical matter, it is to be 
remembered, progresses with ever-increasing rapidity. The 
word is a strong one, but to me the future is in this respect 
appalling to contemplate. We are to be bankrupted by our 
possessions. When Jeremy Belknap and his associates met to 
form this Society, there was, I believe, but one public library in 
Massachusetts, — that of Harvard College, — and it contained 
about 12,000 volumes. Now, one hundred and eight years later, 
that library contains 370,000 volumes, besides an equal num- 
ber of pamphlets ; while another, municipal library, having in 
the mean while grown up within three miles of it, already over- 
shadows it with 700,000 volumes. Our Society has a modest 
collection of 40,000 books, to which must be added nearly 
100,000 pamphlets ; but ours is only one out of over a score 
of collections relating to specialties, — history, law, medicine, 
science, theology, — almost every one of which now numbers 
more volumes than Harvard College could boast in 1791. 
Indeed, it is speaking within safe bounds to say that the 
public collections of the Commonwealth to-day contain over 
two and a half millions of volumes and a million of pamphlets, 
accumulated during the lifetime of our organization. The pro- 
gression has been, and is, geometric. At the same rate the 
accumulation of the twentieth century defies computation in 
advance, — it will altogether defy any nice classification or ex- 



38 

haustive cataloguing. The problem of the future, therefore, is 
not accumulation ; that is provided for. It will go on surely, 
and only too fast. The question of the future, so far as the 
material of history is concerned, relates to getting at what has 
been accumulated, — the ready extraction of the marrow. In 
other words, it is a problem of differentiation, selection, arrange- 
ment, indexing and cataloguing. To-day we are like men 
wandering in a vast wilderness, which is springing up in every 
direction with tropical luxuriance. The one great necessity 
is to have paths carried through it on some intelligible plan, 
which will at once enable us to find our way whither we would 
go, or tell us in what directions further research would be futile. 
More than this, even, the field within which the particular 
library is to be developed, must be defined, and its limits re- 
spected. Within those limits the collection should be made 
as nearly complete as circumstances will permit, and its in- 
dexing, while reduced to a system, must be elevated into a 
science. 

Fortunately for us, so far as the work of collection is con- 
cerned, the future field for usefulness of this Society is in 
great degree marked out for it in advance. In the process of 
differentiation ours should be the Massachusetts historical 
library, just as in this vicinity there is a specialized law li- 
brar}^, theological library, medical library and scientific library, 
— just as there will ultimately be libraries speciall}" devoted 
to the collection of public documents, of periodicals and of 
newspapers. But our collection should include more espe- 
cially the material for history and the monograph, — the 
Massachusetts history and the Massachusetts monograph ; the 
standard historical work can be found in every public and in 
most private libraries ; it should be a subordinate feature in 
ours. Ours is an investigator's collection, not a general 
reader's or a sludent's or a working library ; it is the resort 
of the specialist, and the specialist on what is again a differ- 
entiated branch of a great subject, — the history of Amer- 
ica, of New England, above all of Massachusetts. And were 
we to confine ourselves to Massachusetts alone, I fear the 
accumulation would put severe stress on our power to receive 
and to assimilate. It would not be profitable to enter into 
any computation ; but one suggestion alone would in this con- 
nection furnish food enough for thought, — the annual accu- 



39 

mulation of single copies of all the newspapers and periodicals 
and public documents published in Massachusetts would, I 
apprehend, swamp us hopelessly within a lifetime. 

The day of indiscriminate, unsystematic accumulation is, 
therefore, past ; no receptacle will suffice for it, no power of 
assimilation is equal to the work of ordering and digesting it. 
It only remains for us, as for others, selecting our field, to 
labor in it intelligently as well as strenuously, so as in it to 
attain and hold a position of recognized superiority. If we 
would not fail in our mission, we must then make this build- 
ing a place where the investigator in certain specific branches 
of history will be more likely than elsewhere to find what he 
wants, and to find it readily. 

So much for the first of our functions. But our Society has 
always published as well as collected/ We now already boast 
over ninety printed volumes, the fruit of the century that is 
ending. But publishing implies another branch of collection, 
the collection of material for publication. This building 
should in- the future be a species of recognized manuscript 
clearing-house. It should be the business of those connected 
with it to receive, sort and examine, and destroy or preserve, 
as the case may be, — more frequently, I hope, to destroy 
than preserve, — unprinted material ; and to collect such it 
should be ever on the watch. A diary — the daily record of 
a commonplace life by a commonplace human being — is 
probably as dreary and unprofitable a record as can be con- 
templated by any e3^es except those of him or her who writes ; 
and to those eyes it is apt to be unbearable. Hating to keep, 
we lack the courage to destroy. But, two centuries ago, 
Samuel Pepys kept a diary ; and to-day in some mysterious 
chest in an unsuspected attic of Boston there may be, there 
probably is, hidden away some scarcely less curious i^cord. 
Possibly it is in process of daily formation now. If so, it is 
our function in some way and at some time to secure it ; and, 
if we fail to do so, in so far we miss our destiny. 

But of late, unconsciously to ourselves, the work of the 
Society has been assuming another direction, — a direction 
stimulated by the new historical methods and in close sympathy 
with them. For the first sixty-three years of its existence our 
predecessors confined their efforts to accumulation, and to the 
publication of the series of its so-called " Collections," which, 



40 

in 1856, numbered thirty-three volumes, culminating most 
happily in Deane's edition of Bradford's " History of Plymouth 
Plantation." It then began a new series, that of its Proceed- 
ings, which now numbers thirty volumes ; and these volumes 
of Proceedings are largely made up of monographs, and scraps 
of original material of history thus placed on file, and, by the 
help of our indexes, made conveniently accessible. In this 
way we have already drifted imperceptibly into a channel of 
usefulness which admits of indefinite deepening and broaden- 
ing. The Society should become the patron of the historical 
monograph, — it should produce them, collect them, and pre- 
serve traces of them. Of such our volumes of Proceedings 
may be, and should be, a file and an index ; while our cata- 
logues and our calendars should lay open the contents of our 
unpublished manuscript collections. To accumulate was our 
special function in the nineteenth century ; our function in 
the twentieth will be to make all accumulations available. 

Having thus moved round the circle, we have now come 
back to the point from which we set out, — or rather not, 
perhaps, to the point from which we set out, but a point simi- 
lar to that from which the founders set out one hundred and 
eight years ago. Again the vision of Lord Bathurst ! As the 
founders stood at the close of a century, so we now. They 
then, doubtless, tried to peer behind the curtain which shrouded 
from them what has since become our past, and, failing so to 
do, sought in some degree to fathom the mysteries that curtain 
veiled. In so far as they did thus attempt we can be sure of one 
thing only ; they failed, and they failed utterly, to form a con- 
ception even of the dramatic actualities, — the splendors and 
the horrors that future had in store. They dreamed as little 
that we, their successors, would, at the close of the century 
about to open, be here amid the marshes of the Back Bay, as 
they did that their coming century would see enacted in its 
earlier years the most brilliant drama and the most dreadful 
tragedy the eye of man has ever gazed on. So with us. 
Educated by the developments of the nineteenth century to 
appreciate every possibility of the twentieth, we strain our 
imaginations as we try to picture to ourselves that which it 
may have in store, not for us, but for the successors of the 
founders in the seventh generation. Of one thing only may 



41 

we too rest assured, — it is the unexpected which will occur. 
In that uncertainty, our Society, as we and our descendants, 
must take its chance. But, in addressing ourselves to the 
problems immediately before us, — in taking the century 
plunge we so soon must take, — we can hardly dare hope 
that, in making up the verdict, our offspring in the fourth 
generation will pronounce the work the doing which we now 
have in hand not less well done nor less fruitful of results 
than was the work the founders and our fathers did, when, 
falling from their hands, we took it up. Let him that thinketh 
he standeth take heed lest he fall ; let not him that girdeth 
on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off. 



